Cheap smartphone boom bodes ill for Intel

Intel's current chips aren't "any better than what others offer today," making share gains unlikely said Gwennap. "We are waiting for Intel's first 22nm smartphone part which should help them out, but just 22nm alone won't put them into a performance leadership," he said, noting the FinFET process Intel pioneered as much as two years ahead of other chip makers.

"A new micro-architecture can help, but they need to amp up their game," said Gwennap. "Today they are just delivering what the other market leaders are delivering and not standing out, and they are behind in integrating the baseband and processor-- even Nvidia with Tegra 4 is moving in that direction," he added.

The next big step is bringing Wi-Fi into the apps processor, something Qualcomm has already done and Mediatek announced it will do in a few months. Broadcom, Marvell and Samsung are also pointed to roll Wi-Fi into their next generation chips, he noted.

Click on image to enlarge.

Integrated chips are on the rise as standalone apps processors fade.

Qualcomm is rising to about 33 percent share in apps processors, followed by Samsung which is edging toward 17 percent, according to Gwennap. In house ASICs are declining to about 18 percent as handset makers such as Nokia adopt Qualcomm chips, he said.

When it comes to small and low cost, single chip solution is the key. If you can have one chip to equip with all required features, why using more?
Question is whether Intel has enough talent to push everything into a single chip while maintaining the power consumption to be low.

Interestingly, I don't yet know 1 person with Windows 8. No compelling reason to "upgrade" apparently... I only know one person with a windows phone (I was a windows phone holdout through 6.5) Their timing has been bad.

I see contradictions in this analysis, though. Mainly the bit about integration. It wasn't long ago that we were being told how Intel had it all wrong, because they WERE developing integrated chips, and low cost smart phones wanted non-integrated solutions, so they could mix and match. So which is it?
Also, I've been seeing a lot of ads about the Surface Pro lately, so it looks to me like Intel is focusing on tablets, no? I've no reason to believe the Surface Pro is the end of Intel's interest in tablets?
And also, if the market for cheap smartphones is booming, and the market for expensive smartphones is stagnating, then why wouldn't that bode ill for Apple as well?
Dunno. I get the impression that some pessimism sells better than other pessimism, logic be damned?

I think Rick is generally correct in his article, the market shifting to low end bodes ill for Intel, at least as far as the smartphone goes. Don't think Intel will target the low end but get what they can of the higher end.
Intel has to make a strong stand on the tablet side of the mobile market, that's where personal electronic devices are eating their PC base. There LTE integration is not so important.
What Intel faces is price pressure in the tablet arena. They need an SoC strategy where as much of the chip part of the BOM is in their silicon, or at least in their multi-die package. I can see them having to be able to sell that for a hundred bucks in a low end variant.

One guess about this talks about integrated solution(including LTE), on a 14nm process, coming in 2014 and beating the competition also on power consumption of the modem.
It fits with intel's remarks about 14nm in 2014 , and a separate remark about lte integration in 2014.
So we'll just have to wait and see.

Given history and consumer purchasing wants (not needs but wants) I would have to say the company that provides the lowest cost end product with reasonable performance and a good feature set would be well positioned for future sales. I know that there are many who just have to have the latest/fastest/who cares at what price device but the volume business is in the lower cost fuller featured smartphone market. We don't want to give up features but do want them for lower cost. Time will tell if Intel or the competition will win out..